Alexander Hamilton (b.1950) grew up in
Caithness, Scotland. He studied Drawing and Painting at Edinburgh
College of Art, after qualifying, he spent 6 months recording the
plants on the uninhabited island of Stroma, creating his first
photogram images. This began a 40 year journey exploring connections to
plants and landscape. His work was shown throughout Europe with the
exhibition ‘The Peace Rose and the Pursuit of Perfection’. He also
collaborated with a centre
for plant research at the University Hohenheim Stuttgart on the use of
plants as bio indicators, shown at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh
in 2002. In 2008 a major showing of his photogram images, Blue Flora
Celtica, was presented at the Foksal Gallery Warsaw. From 2002 to 2007
he worked with Richard Ashrowan, on creating a multi-screen moving
image installation based on natural landscapes. These works have been
exhibited at the Threshold Artspace in Perth, Ruskin Gallery in
Cambridge, the Scottish National
Portrait Gallery and Fabrycka Sztuki in Poland. In 2009 he completed a
one year residency programme at Brantwood, responding to Ruskin’s ideas
on ecology and botany, with funding from The Leverhulme Trust. In 2010
he will complete a new programme of work with the University of Life
Sciences, Poznan for the British Council Darwin Now programme.

Art & Ecology - Observational Method

My
work encourages viewers to renegotiate their relationship with the
environment. This approach is developed with a method based upon
Goethe’s theory of knowledge: ‘conscious-process-participation’. It
focuses attention on the phenomena themselves, and on the dynamic
relationships formed in space and time, between the observer and the
observed.

Goethe
was doubtful as to whether conventional scientific methodology should
be accepted as the exclusive approach to nature, relying instead on his
own, direct experience of the natural world as a source for his
scientific insights into nature’s processes. This ‘Goethean’ way of
science pays rigorous attention to empathy, intuition and imagination.
Most artists spontaneously engage with the phenomena of the natural
world without necessarily being conscious of
the why and how of their approach. Goethe, on the other hand, directed
his conscious awareness toward the process of engagement itself.

He
developed a methodology for a participatory, phenomenon-focused science
that allows anybody who engages in its sustained practice to access an
experience of reality as process, interaction and relationship. This
methodology has four stages: 1) exact sense perception; 2) exact
sensorial fantasy; 3) seeing is beholding; and 4) being one with the
object. It involves acknowledging our own personal involvement in how
we usually meet the world, and the fact that
we habitually employ a set of basic assumptions. This observational
method is central to how I engage with my work and the art works that I
create.